Harley Quinn is an interesting character because her defining characteristic is her mental instability. Yes the villain is colourful and obnoxious and ultra-violent, but her insanity really is front and centre of her characterisation. Recent DC comics that have traded directly on this mental health issue have included White Knight and Heroes in Crisis, so I wasn’t sure if I needed another miniseries to explore her shattered psyche quite so soon. On the other hand, I’ve been really impressed with the beautiful digitally painted artwork of Stjepan Sejic over the last couple of years, so I couldn’t resist when I heard he was behind Harleen, a prestige 3-issue miniseries exploring the character’s origins.
Harley’s real tragedy is that she was originally a criminal psychologist, Dr Harleen Quinzel, working at the infamous Arkham Asylum, and driven mad by the co-dependent, abusive relationship she shared with the iconic Batman rogue that she had been trying to treat, the Joker. Sejic’s plot really fleshes this out, suggesting that Quinzel’s psyche was already under pressure before her first visitation with ‘Mister Jay’. If anything, this series really charts the end of Harleen, rather than the beginnings of Harley. If you’re looking to find out why she dresses as a jester, where that giant mallet came from, or when she started referring to her loved ones as ‘pudding’, then you’re going to be disappointed.
What you really get is a careful telling of the events which led Harleen to fall in love with the Joker; so it reads like a slow-burn romance with psychological thriller trappings, rather than vice versa. Sejic’s artwork plays into this, portraying both Harleen and the Joker with the beauty of the hottest Hollywood starlets. The impressive environments and storytelling are dark but contemporary, so you could easily see this comic unfolding in the same universe as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies. By the end I was fully invested in the inevitable tragedy, and I’d actually love to see Sejic return to extend this into a Harleen trilogy, perhaps with a second volume covering the traumas of Harley’s relationship with the Joker at it’s worst, and a final volume showing her character growth as she managed to move on from his (literally) toxic influence…
